The preponderance of literature on the rights of aliens under international law is concerned with the vexing and complicated prob-lem of property expropriations and compensation, and the seemingly unanswerable question of how the world community should frame sub-stantive law satisfactory to both capital exporting and capital importing nations. Notwithstanding an enormous outpouring of academic writing, the organized international community has made no headway whatever on these issues; to date, the International Law Commission has been unable to produce a draft on the law of state responsibility. The drains on cet efer ostraie se lincip has been apport n Roberto Ago of Italy. Although the law of state responsibility encom-passes far more than the issue of property takings, the impasse on that question has almost totally inhibited progress, even on less controver-sial issues. In the meantime, international dealings continue, the number and significance of transactions and investments across national bound-aries increase, and attorneys throughout the world, particularly in the developing countries, find themselves confronted with substantive and procedural systems very different from those at home. For the private international lawyer, procedural hurdles frequently loom foremost in his analysis of a legal problem confronting a client.